The boundaries of suffering and honor

This article in the New York Times on the Purple Heart is fascinating to me from an anthropological point-of-view. The ways that Americans are grappling conceptually with mental illness and the ways that veterans' health problems in recent wars challenge our existing categories of pain and suffering would be a fascinating dissertation topic, if I didn't already have an area of study carved out. It needs further investigation, too, in light of how shamefully neglected our veterans often are. The bureaucratic nightmares facing veterans and their families that I heard about on NPR on Veterans Day brought tears to my eyes.

It's not a novel argument for me to point out that medical advances in past decades allow many persons to survive physical injuries that would previously have killed them. How we come to terms with the person who lives on, though, and what unique needs and challenges s/he experiences, is something we are only beginning to scratch the surface of. But why must we culturally delineate those forms of suffering from the ones of those who cannot return to everyday life for other reasons? This is such a complex question, and so evocative to me of how intuitive it is for us post-Enlightenment beings to separate body from mind.

John E. Bircher III, director of public relations for the Military Order of the Purple Heart explains: “You have to had shed blood by an instrument of war at the hands of the enemy of the United States. Shedding blood is the objective.”